The girl being interviewed, was unfortunately the product of a lot of family issues. Her mom, like me, became religious on her own, but it should be noted that she also joined like the most extreme right-wing group of Orthodox Jews out there, something that most ba’alei teshuvah (pple that become religious) do not do.

The woman being interviewed was also a product of divorce, had her mother run away with her and her siblings at one point, only to turn around and join the community again. Clearly and sadly lots of issues.

Also, there are some points touched upon in the article that I simply can’t speak about because I’m not part of this Chasidic community and therefore even though I’m a totally religious Orthodox Jew myself, some of these community practices (which I’d like to stress are community practices and NOT Jewish law)are completely foreign to me.

In other cases, the woman being interviewed mentions aspects of Jewish law that all observant Jews practice, but she puts them in such a negative light that I cringed as I was reading about them. (As with many things in life, there are positive ways to understand them, and negative ways. Every aspect of Jewish law mentioned in that article was given the absolute worst spin possible.)

I can’t undo what is going on in that community or the way it has been portrayed, but my goal with my Jew in the City campaign is to A) be able to put things into my own words (something the members of this Chassidic community were not given the chance to do) and B)try to show that it is possible to be fully committed to Jewish law and a Torah lifestyle without being extreme or judgmental – something that unfortunately some of the Orthodox Jews that make the news have not managed to achieve.

Statistics being flexible or not, the fact that a stranger, in a far away place, sent me an email about an article (that got to me in an unusual way) the moment I had finished reading it was downright weird no matter what the probabilities show.

For me, the most important thing to do at a time like that is to ask oneself “are there any greater implications here?” How could it be that there are times that a person thinks of an old friend, whom he hasn’t spoken to in years, and then gets a call from that very same friend the next day? Is there some sort of interconnectivity in the universe, and is that force, perhaps God?

Imagine only 30 people bought a lottery ticket every week, but another 50 million, just for fun, wrote down what they thought would be the winning numbers. Assuming that the right numbers were guessed, the odds of it being by one of the 30 paid ticket holders is only about 1 in 1.6 million. It could take a long long time before there was a real pay out…

This argument can go back and forth. Statistics can be used to prove anything you want really. It’s really just how you look at it.